Environment Variables

Environment Variables On Codeship Basic

For most applications, you will need to set environment variables to be passed in your project’s build so that build steps, tests and deployments can all run successfully.

On Codeship Basic, this can be done either through your project’s Project Settings screen or through exporting environment variables during your setup or test commands. Additionally, we provide a set of pre-populated, global environment variables with information related to your build and the commit that triggered it.

Environment Page on Project Settings

On the Environment page of your project settings you can enter the variable name and values into the corresponding fields.

We will export these environment variables to the environment your build runs via a command similar to:

export VARIABLE_NAME="value"

Single (') and double quotes ("), as well as backticks (`) in the value part of your variable are automatically escaped by prepending them with a backslash (\). Other characters with a special meaning (e.g. $) are not escaped automatically to allow you to use them with your environment variables. (For example to include the value of another variable.)

We export your environment variables before all other commands of your build. This is pure convenience for setting up the environment but completely equal to exporting environment variables yourself.

Directly in Setup or Test Commands

You can also export environment variables in your setup or test commands. So, for example, you could enter the following setup commands:

rvm use 2.0.0
export RAILS_ENV="test"
bundle install

There is no difference between setting RAILS_ENV like this and adding it on the Environment page of your project settings. The advantage of putting it into the environment configuration is that secret values will not show up in your build log.

Default Environment Variables

By default, Codeship populates a list of CI/CD related environment variables, such as the branch and the commit ID.

Note: The value of CI_PULL_REQUEST is false, and doesn’t indicate if a commit has a corresponding pull request, or if the build was triggered by a pull request. The variable exists because some third-party integrations require its existence.